Do you know why it is just a morning thing though? :? She is fine the rest of the day! And could her consumption of wallpaper etc have CAUSED her to become like this? As she was fine before
I can reassure you that her her consumption of wall paper would
not have caused this.
It's a
sign of a gastro intestinal tract which can slow down minimally, so bunny craves fibre to keep it moving.
As said before, the trouble is that the guey mass from the sizing in paper & cardboard can cause a blockage if something else happens to slow the gut down even more.
I don't know
why they seek woody fibre. The main difference from hay/grass is that woody fibre is
totally indigestable whereas the cellulose fibre in hay is partially digestable by the caecal bacteria.
Wildies eat a surprising amount of woody fibre, particularly young self seeded hawthorn & blackthorn saplings. When there was the 1st wave of myxo & drastic reduction of the rabbit population, a lot of moorland reverted to scrub. We don't know how much woody fibre they eat from tree roots underground. I've often seen them actually climb into bramble thickets in spring for the old bramble leaves, when the new grass is too rich for them.
I surmise that domestic rabbits do the best they can when natural additional wood fibre isn't available.
Of course Thumper was finally found to have extensive scarring throughout his gut from a form of TB never recorded in rabbits before - so you needn't worry about that
Benjie with his snuffles is a bag of nerves - stress causes gut slow down. Many owners of snuffle buns had noticed that they went off their feed from time to time, but Benjie was ridiculous. At 1st. he wouldn't come out from his hidey hole or under the bed to feed unless I was there, apart from a quick trip to the litter tray:shock:
At long last I realised he was too frightened to come out & put storage boxes of forage under the bed for him. Cardboard eating stopped, but started again in autumn.
He was spooking out but only at night at the slightest creak in the house with an occasional thump & his GI tract was showing obvious slow down. A fox had taken up residence under the garden shed & had made a path to my pond (3/4 way down the garden) to drink. I got the fox to move & dropped the water level in the pond. Benjie was fine again. I add that he's a house bun but rarely goes downstairs, & only if I'm there.
So why in the morning? I wonder whether the night life - cats or foxes are unsettling her fractionally. How good is their hearing? Thumper heard a cat digging a pooh hole 100' away through locked double glazing, gave a couple of warning thumps & rushed upstairs where he felt safe. He wasn't badly phased by predators as long as he could get upstairs. Of course Benjie's snuffles would impair their best warning system -smell, maybe contributing to his anxiety.
To try to make him feel more secure I made him an artifical warren complex round the bedroom. He uses it all the time. If you think she's anxious at night, a tube might help, or if she'll just chew it, you can get plastic pipe 6" from plumber's supply merchants.
Rabbits are fascinating creatures but it took me ages to even begin to see the world from their viewpoint & I still forget.